A Queasy Bit of Genius
December 2, 2011
By T.W. Burger
I have to admit that a teeny part of me thinks there is somebody absolutely brilliant behind all this.
Americans destroying what it is to be American in order to protect America from people who would destroy what it is to be American.
I mean, WOW. It’s like MAD magazine on crystal meth.
On Tuesday the U.S. Senate, which, I’m beginning to think, may be the terrorist organization we really need to worry about, voted to keep in place a controversial section of the defense spending bill that would allow the indefinite detention of any terrorism suspect, including American citizens.
I can really see the attraction, to be honest. There are, plain and simple, really scary people out there. Some of them are just plain crazy, and some of them are crazy but think they are acting on behalf of Allah, or Jesus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for all we know. Like it or not, they’re out there, walking around, watching the world through the warped lenses of their assorted lunacies, and perfectly happy to go to glory on behalf of their own delusions, if they can just take some of us – preferably a whole lot of us – along for the ride.
Well, that’s the picture that’s hung on the side of legislation like this, anyway, a poster to convince us that we must do everything in our power to quell the threat against us.
No matter the cost.
That last part is not even in the fine print. It is not even mentioned.
Of course, we are really pretty vague about whom that threat actually comes from. The terror-of-the-moment is anybody who worships Allah, and there are some good reasons for that. On the other hand, back in World War II, We The People locked up a lot of innocent folks – 110,000 Japanese-Americans and about 16,000 German-born citizens and immigrants for much the same reason we want to lock up people who go to the wrong place of worship on the suspicion that they may be jihadists.
Of those Germans, perhaps one in 10 was members of the Nazi Party. Eight were actually suspected of espionage.
Eight.
I spent an afternoon walking around what was left of the Manzanar Japanese internment camp in Southern California some years back. It had just been handed over to the National Park Service, but nothing had been done to pretty it up. I was OK until I found the cemetery. A number of the graves were very small, only a few feet long, with toys, trinkets, and folded blankets placed over them, by people, perhaps, who are not simply shrugging their internment off as a temporary inconvenience.
Guess what happened to their jobs and property while they were gone.
In any case, the long internment of so many without due process, based in large part on the way they looked or talked or cooked their sausage has been a matter of some shame to the U.S. Apparently, it has not be so much of a shame that we have been cured of heading in that direction again.
Perhaps the fact that our detention camps are not, strictly speaking, on American soil helps make our updated detentions seem more humane, or at least less un-American.
Sixteen Democrats, among them Pennsylvania’s own Robert Casey, joined the usual foam-at-the-mouth crowd to vote against amending the legislation to remove the section on authorizing indefinite detention. It gave me the same sensation I had when I once was convinced there was a snake in my sleeping bag.
To be sure, there are not very many people locked up at the nominally illegal military prison in Guantanamo. At last count, there were perhaps 170 or so people who are adjudged to be too dangerous to let go, but who for one reason or another cannot be tried under whatever legal rules they are still sticking to down there.
OK, so these are arguably really bad people. I’m sure they honestly hate us. If they didn’t hate us when they were thrown into that hot, humid dog-run years and years ago, they do now. Maybe it’s hard for some of us to feel sympathy.
But think about it.
The renewed authorization would make it possible, LEGALLY possible, to snap you up and haul you away for as long as they want, even for the remainder of your natural life, without ever allowing you to be charged, to have your day in court, without ever speaking to a civilian attorney. And all because somebody somewhere with the right title on his or her door decided you were a threat to national security, based on an informant, an astrological forecast, or the reading of chicken guts. Doesn’t matter. A paper gets signed and you are gone.
There are people who like this bill, obviously, who think it’s just the thing for combating the newest crop of boogie-beings that haunt our dreams.
President Obama has threatened to veto the bill if it contains the “indefinite detention” language in it, and hooray for him. The really stupid thing about it is that throngs of people who hate anything as long as Obama is for it, would, when not drinking that particular Kool-Aid, be whooping his praises for standing up for the Constitution that is supposed to protect us from this kind of tail-tucked hogwash.
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© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
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Passage and gauges
August 16, 2010
This weekend I helped a young man of my acquaintance begin his instruction in the dying art of driving a stick shift.
I took my old Dodge truck, a well-worn workhorse nearly 30 years old. It has a five-speed that’s a little cranky at times, but good for the instruction of a 14-year-old – we’ll call him T – whose experience with driving has mostly been via computer games which, unlike real life, have a reset button.
His dad had first honors, of course. A boy’s first experiences behind the wheel should be with his dad, if he’s lucky enough to have one around.
Part of the experience, of course, is to be reassured that sudden stalls, jackrabbit starts, and slung gravel have all been done before and are nothing to be ashamed of. The reassurances come, of course, with the recounting of a few examples from our own youth. They also come with the proviso that we will tell everybody about the more extravagant errors committed by our student, but we will end with comments about how much better, after all, he did than we did.
It’s just part of the tradition. Everybody in my high school, for example, knew how I had gotten the drivers’ education car, an enormous burgundy ’65 Chevy Belair with a manual tranny, up on two wheels in a parking lot.
I had a lump on the back of my head for a week from where the coach’s UGA class ring whacked me after that one.
T. talked about different kinds of vehicles all day. How he wants to have a 4×4 pickup truck for hauling stuff, a sports car for going fast, a motorcycle, and an ATV. I think he also mentioned a jet-ski.
Yeah, me, too.
I had forgotten how important all that is when a boy is that age, before he gets his first real taste of freedom with his own drivers’ license and, if he’s really lucky, his own car. I bought my own, and they were real junkers. There’s no better way to learn about the operation of a vehicle than to own one that needs a lot of tinkering to keep it operating.
Back then, in the 1960s, I could tell you the make and model of everything on both sides of the road. Today, I can still do that, as long as whatever is on either side of the road was build in the 1960s or before. Almost everything else looks equally indistinguishable.
There was something else I had forgotten about being 14 or so. Something that occupies most of a young fella’s attention at that age.
On the way to see a blood-and-guts action movie (lots of muscle, car chases, explosions, and gun-fire…a perfect guy pic) T asked me if I had ever noticed that the clear plastic covers on the instrument panel, conical with black plastic tips, looked just like breasts.
I had never noticed. I had always been looking at the gauges.
“No, I never noticed that,” I told him. “However, I promise you that I will never be able to look at those gauges the same way, ever again.”
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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
Saying goodbye to Davy Crockett
March 20, 2010
Note: This column appeared in the March 20, 2010, edition of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg.
Known for his coon skin cap, Fess Parker as Davy Crockett was an idol to many young baby boomers.
When I opened up the Web site for my hometown newspaper, out of the corner of my eye I saw a photo of Fess Parker in the far left column, the one reserved for the obituaries of famous or infamous people. I hesitated before I would let myself look.
Davy Crockett was dead.
“LOS ANGELES (AP) — Actor Fess Parker, who became every baby boomer’s idol in the 1950s and launched a craze for coonskin caps as television’s Davy Crockett, died Thursday of natural causes. He was 85.”
He got me drunk once. Well, a little tipsy. More on that in a minute.
If you’re of a certain age, you remember that tall, lanky figure dressed up in fringed buckskin, fighting his way across the mythic American frontier of the first half of the 19th century, wrestling bears, fighting or befriending Indians and besting bad guys.
OK, it was the frontier as imagined by Walt Disney, which had little relationship to reality, but never mind. Disney was all about imagination, and he gave us somebody bigger and better than real life — a hero, a straight-shooter (literally and figuratively) and a guy we all wanted to be.
Parker later sort of reprised his role as Crockett in a TV series about Daniel Boone, playing the title role and, for all appearances, wearing the same suit, expression and personality.
Back in the spring of 1997, I was in the Santa Barbara area on vacation with Sue. Her dad had worked for Disney for a long time and during an occasion where he and Parker were receiving Disney Legend awards, Parker had said if we ever got up his way, to stop in and visit his winery.
A few years later, we did. We went in, sent a message to the offices upstairs, and went to look around in the gift shop.
“He’s not going to come, you know,” I told her. “Somebody will come down and say Mr. Parker is tied up, but they will be happy to give us a tour.”
A few minutes later, I’m poking around wondering if I could live with myself if I bought a Fess Parker golf shirt, because I don’t golf, when a voice, THAT voice, called out Sue’s name as a question.
Sue, Fess Parker, and me, slightly inebriated.
I turned, and there stood Davy Crockett.
He looked about nine feet tall, with a mop of white hair, a cotton shirt and blue jeans. Solemnly, I shook his hand and introduced myself. I am a newspaper reporter. I have interviewed my share of famous and notorious people. I am cool.
In my head, though, a small blond boy inclined to chubbiness and wearing a coonskin cap charged forward to the front of my mind and squealed “It’s DAVY CROCKETT!”
It went pretty much like that all day.
It was like hanging around with an old friend. Part of that, for me, was because I had known him forever, had been him, in important ways, wearing my coonskin cap and slaying swarms of bad guys in scores of backyard battles.
He invited us to a private wine tasting. My memory is foggy, but it was from nine to a dozen wines. He was giving me a lesson in why wine lists use words like “earthy” and “woody” to describe background flavors in various wines. By the end of the tasting, I was pretty buzzed.
He piled us into his enormous old Mercedes sedan and hauled us into the village of Los Olivos for lunch.
On the way, he told a story about little Fess riding his dad’s mule into nearby Fort Worth. The animal got into the middle of an intersection and decided he had had enough traveling for one day, and simply stopped. Parker said his father had to come to town to jump-start the beast.
All the while, though I remained outwardly calm, that dumb kid in the coonskin cap kept running around in my head, issuing war whoops and being obstreperous.
Finally, I told him about that little hellion stomping around in my imagination.
“Don’t worry,” he said, with that lopsided grin, “I get that a lot.”
I’ll bet he did. Goodbye, Davy.
King was ordinary man who accomplished extraordinary things
January 17, 2010
Note, this “Burger to Go” ran as an item on the Review & Opinion page in Jan. 17,2010 Patriot-News, Harrisburg, Pa. Part of the text was adapted from an earlier “Burger to Go.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 81 this year, perhaps gone frail and a little dotty. Thinking back on his arc as firebrand and martyr, that is frankly hard to imagine.
Those of us who were around in his day remember him differently than younger folks do.
While he was alive he was, depending on where you stood, a visionary, a man of God who held his country’s collective feet to the fire of its own founding documents or a royal pain and a threat to the (white) American way of life. Some saw him as the devil himself.
Since his assassination in the spring of 1968, he has undergone a sort of apotheosis and elevation almost to a kind of deity. That’s too bad.
What was remarkable about King was that he was, in the end, an ordinary man who accomplished extraordinary things. His death by an assassin’s bullet was unusual only in that he was in the forefront of the national awareness when it happened.
The Ku Klux Klan and any number of groups and individuals scattered fear and death across the landscape in those years, indeed, for decades beforehand.
One of the most heinous Klan murders happened 15 minutes from the house where I grew up in Athens, Ga. I was 14. It was in the summer of 1964, just nine days after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The victim was Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn of the Army Reserve, and a Washington D.C.-area educator, husband and father.
He and two colleagues were on their way back from a Reserve event at Fort Benning, Ga., when three KKK members pulled up next to the out-of-state car and gave Penn blasts from a pair of 12-gauge shotguns, blowing off the back of his head.
That happened at home, MY home. This wasn’t a grim photo of a lynching in the rural South. This was now.
People I didn’t know, but knew by sight, had done this. The world looked just like it always had. People went about their business, shopped for groceries and did laundry. Adults talked about it in hushed tones, some fearful, some gleeful. Some of the kids at school joked about it. A good start, some said.
Years later, one of the Klansmen involved in that murder, though not one of those in the car, owned a greasy spoon called The Open House Cafe across from where I worked the night shift at a print shop.
I used to go there for coffee and watch him. If it was me the way I am now, after 20-plus years as a reporter, I’d have asked him what he was thinking that night, what they thought they’d accomplish. But I was 19 or 20 then and afraid.
It was a different time. Almost a different country.
I mean in the sense of “Whites Only” signs over water fountains, and public rest rooms labeled “Men,” “Women” and “Colored.”
Fast forward nearly 50 years. Things are different. Not perfect but different. Change has come to America, as President Obama said in his acceptance speech, if at a glacial pace. It wasn’t fanaticism we saw on those faces in Chicago’s Grant Park that election night, despite fearful comments to that effect.
To be sure, there were and are fanatics on all sides, some of whom would deify Obama and some of whom would gladly put him in his grave rather than see him succeed.
The light in those faces late on Election Night was not the deification of Obama, but that of people who have for centuries stood out in the cold of our nation’s further reaches, allowed only to look in the windows and dream. On Nov. 4, 2008, they suddenly saw the door to that house open and a hand beckon them to come in.
Yes, there is still racial hatred and violence. Witness the 2008 beating death of a Latino man in Shenandoah, not so far from where you probably sit reading this.
But I can tell you that in 1963 that story would likely have never made even the local news outside of a one-inch police blotter entry, if that.
Even if it had, nobody would have investigated to the point that five locals, including three cops, would have been indicted in the case.
Back then, it would have been a thing whispered in bars and in sitting rooms. Some might even have called it a shame.
We can only speculate as to what Dr. King’s take would be on the movement he helped spark.
On the one hand, the same nation that once enslaved African-Americans has elected one to its highest office.
On the other, well. Look deep into your own heart. What do you see?
(Note: I believe all four of the Klansmen are now dead. One of the triggermen was shot in the chest—by a shotgun, ironically—by a man with whom he had been arguing.
The last time I drove by The Open House Cafe, which had been closed for some years, it had become a church.)
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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
The photography of Irving Browning
June 14, 2009
This is NOT a column, but DEFINITELY worth checking out. If you’re anywhere NEAR Gettysburg during the dates listed and love photography, and/or love New York City, please go see this exhibit.
http://www.gettysburgfestival.org/program/event_detail.asp?event_id=62
Miniburger to Go: Recycled Fear
June 8, 2009
I’ve mentioned fairly often that my own religious beliefs don’t entail a belief in an actual conscious entity out there that is looking out for me or, worse, looking for me.
But I was raised in that tradition, for sure. You know, the one where your parents and the other vast beings that rumbled and boomed way up there over your head, warning that this or that bad thing was going to happen to you if you did or didn’t do this or that.
It was a tradition that taught you that failing to dress up properly for church, or not going at all, showed a disdain for God, and he was gonna getcha for that. And mercy on the pore chile that fell asleep while the preacher droned on and on, though it seemed to be OK for the older members of the congregation to do.
It’s all about ignorance and superstition, as far as I’m concerned, though I have often been moved how faith can get people through some really awful times. I guess you could say I believe in faith, but not so much in the object of that faith.
I was reminded of my own programming in that regard the other day in the newsroom, when the librarians were throwing out a lot of old books, including, to my sorrow, a whole set of encyclopedias. I spent a lot of happy hours as a kid thumbing through our set of Colliers, stumbling upon one wonder after another.
One of the books in the scrap bin was a Bible. I am, as I said, an athiest, an admirer of Dawkins and Hitchins, and of Sam Harris. And yet, seeing the Bible in the trash bothered me, I mean “bothered” as in slightly afraid that bad things would happen because we threw away a Bible. It was an enlightening experience.
Maybe I should go find my copy of Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Panda’s Thumb” and throw it away, just to make up for it.
Nah. Not happening.
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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
Godzilla rediscovers Badminton
April 14, 2009
The Kid is 13. He is nearly as tall as I and skinny enough that I think he must have to run around in the shower to get wet.
I am, for reasons that are not clear, on the other side of a badminton net from him.
He is beating the crap out of me.
Correction, it’s not a net, but a clothesline, but that’s a quibble. Also, The Kid’s mom is playing beside me. She is a smart lady, and pretty much stays out of my way.
Oh, yeah, I’m a Badminton-playing devil. I am everywhere at once, racquet whistling through the air, my lithe form bounds like a gazelle from one end of the court to the other….
Well, that’s the fantasy. The closest I came to playing badminton like that was the last time I had played it, when I was about the age this kid is now, nearly four decades ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth.
He’s Sue’s grandson, full of that goofy, manic energy that kids get when they are growing at the rate of about an inch an hour and they’re interested in everything but holding still.
I, on the other hand, am discovering why it is that all those people I see about my health — my trainer, assorted medical professionals and a chiropractor – tell me I need to get out and MOVE more.
Apparently, sometime over the past five or six years I turned to stone, as though I had caught a fleeting glimpse of Medusa as she drove past in her limo. I can move, sure, but it’s less a thing of nerve and sinew than it is a geological process, like watching a mountain erode.
The Kid slams the birdie my way. It comes in high, and then dives for the grass just barely on my side of the clothesline. I see that I am too far back. JUMP! My brain flashes to my body.
“Huh?” My body responds. “Me? NOW? All the way over THERE?”
The birdie lands ingloriously on the grass. I lumber over toward it, bend ever so slowly and pluck it out of the lawn. I am pretty sure I can hear a sound like rusty gate hinges. I turn and lurch toward my corner of the court. I have a clear image in my mind of Godzilla klutzing his way through Tokyo, racquet clenched firmly in his knobby hands.
We play a fast series of volleys, during which I hit the birdie about six times. Two of those hits were accidental. Godzilla flailing at the buzzing fighter planes. Oops, there goes the train station. Yikes! Sorry about that bridge.
During one graceless lunge, I turn my ankle. I am wheezing and wheeling like a drunken buffalo. The Kid finally calls the game by the simple expedience of jumping on the nearby trampoline. He starts bounding and flipping like a spider on a griddle, or a stretched out version of the Energizer Bunny having a seizure.
I see him trying to figure if he can leap from the trampoline to the rope swing hanging from the adjacent tree-house, but it’s too far. I hobble over, clear the rope, and hold it next to the trampoline. His eyes light up. He boings fiercely, then arcs through the air and grabs the knot I have tied halfway up the rope for a hand-hold, and swings out across the lawn, a scrawny Tarzan.
He runs back to the trampoline and shouts that he wants to do it again. I have a brief, mean thought that I could jerk the rope out of the way just as he goes for it, just to be mean.
I don’t, of course. We do the trampoline/rope thing about six times before he lands at a run and takes off for the farm pond, hitting the little aluminum rowboat in a flying leap. I groan and stagger over to stand on the dock and watch. He hooks a bungee cord to the dock and the rear of the boat and laughing, rows hard away from the dock, only to be pulled backwards to where he started.
“This is fun!” he shouts.
“It’s good practice!” I shout back.
He doesn’t get it. He will.
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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
Talking About the Weather(men)
March 22, 2009
The voice on the other end of the line dripped with conspiracy, and dragged me back in time.
He was unhappy over a piece I’d written about a former 60s radical-left activist who was to come speak at a local university.
Long before the students he was to address were born, William Ayers, now 64, was a founder of the radical Weather Underground, a group whose name was inspired by a line from a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Weathermen were responsible for riots and the bombing of several public buildings in the late 1960s and 1970s. Most of the Weather Underground’s activities were in protest of the Vietnam War, which the group believed to be illegal. Ayers’ appearance on the state university campus was funded by private money, and his presence had nothing at all to do with his colorful and violent past. His lecture was about finding better ways to provide education in urban areas where there is little money or parental involvement.
My caller was eager to uncover a liberal conspiracy because I hadn’t written the story the way he thought I should. Oh. Well.
He did open a door for me though, back to the 60s, the decade when I grew from a boy to a man, the decade during which the whole country went absolutely crazy.
From his voice, I am sure my caller was not old enough to remember anything from 40 years ago.
I was there. I wasn’t in the middle of much violence, but that doesn’t matter, because I wasn’t living under a flat rock.
Try to imagine this: I grew up in the 1950s, in a safe world of gray flannel, of Eisenhower’s America, of booming factories and a stable world. Everything, at least to a kid in the ‘burbs, was pretty safe and reasonable. I mean there were personal drama, schoolyard bullies and the myriad insults of growing up, period. But there was structure to everything. It made sense, even if it wasn’t all friendly.
And then along came the 60s.
Here are some snapshots, things that were everywhere, in the newpapers and TVs, and laced themselves into our days and nights:
Click: In the summer of ‘63, four little girls were killed by a KKK bomb blast in Birmingham.
Click: Two months later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and two days after that, the whole country watched on national TV as his accused assassin was shot to death by a man with the dime-store-gangster name of Jack Ruby.
Click: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved by the Senate 73-27. Two days later, three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia Miss. (their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.).
Click: President Johnson signed a sweeping civil rights bill into law, and two days later, Lt.Col. Lemuel Penn, a black U.S. Army Reserve officer was gunned down by the KKK near my home.
Click: The next summer, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the voters’ rights law. A few days later, rioting that claimed 34 lives broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles.
Click: The following summer, July of 1966, eight student nurses died in Chicago at the hands of Richard Speck, and only a few weeks later Charles Joseph Whitman set himself up in a tower at the University of Texas and killed 15 people.
Click: The next summer, a month after I and most of my close friends graduated from high school, race rioting broke out in Newark, NJ. 27 people died, and 10 days later, rioting claimed more than 40 lives in Detroit.
Click: That October, tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters marched in Washington D.C. The Census Clock at the Commerce Department ticked past 200 million.
Click: In the new year of 1968, three college students were killed in a confrontation with highway patrolmen in Orangeburg SC during a civil rights protest against a whites-only bowling alley.
Click: Though we didn’t find out about it until about a year later, that March, the My Lai Massacre occured in Vietnam, with the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed men, women and children.
Click: Three weeks later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and three months after that, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was murdered after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary.
Click: Of symbolic significance, 12 days after My Lai, Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the very symbol of the America we all felt we were losing, died.
Click: In August, a riot broke out between Chicago police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention.
Click: Four months later, Ted Kennedy’s car plunged off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne, and a few weeks later Charles Manson’s bizarre cult murdered actress Sharon Tate and eight other people in her L.A. home.
Click: Five days later my friend Herman T. Fields, a couple of days into his second tour in Vietnam, stepped on a landmine and pinwheeled into eternity.
Click: That November, 250,000 protested against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. and, in the final month of the decade, four people died at a Rolling Stones concert in California, including one who was stabbed by a member of the Hell’s Angels.
Click: On May 4, 1970, four students were killed and nine wounded at Kent State University in Ohio by members of the Ohio National Guard. Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, but other students who were shot had merely been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance. Reaction in the nation was immediate, and was, along with the reaction to My Lai, directly responsible for the end of popular support for the war, and the country became even more divided.
Today, William Ayers the “domestic terrorist” is a professor, an urban education specialist with 15 books on the subject to his credit. He was somebody entirely different 40 years ago. I wonder how many people are very much like they were 40 years ago.
My caller wanted to know why on Earth somebody whose ideas were so dangerous THEN would be allowed to speak to students NOW.
I probably don’t even have to mention the whole First Amendment thing. And I have to guess that my caller’s idea of education is NOT to expose students to all sorts of ideas and viewpoints. But part of functioning in the real world is to be able to tell the difference between butter and bullshit, you should excuse my French. If you believe anybody’s party line without question, your toast is going to taste funny.
By the way, the group Ayers was associated with never killed anybody. A nail bomb they were building blew up in a Greenwich Village building, killing three Weathermen, including Ayers’ girlfriend.
That bomb was, in fact, being built with the intention of killing some military personnel, but the truth is that it never happened, though my caller seemed to believe that thinking about killing somebody is the same as actually killing them.
If that’s true, I think most of us would be locked up by now. I know I would.
That said I’m not sure how much credence I can give to somebody who speaks with so much passion about an era he did not live through. I can remember feeling throughout the 60s and 70s and beyond that the entire world I had known had flashed like tissue in fire and become something else, someplace else. Nothing, nobody, no sensibility, came out of it unscathed. We burned, smashed, and tore at our social fabric. Even now, four decades hence, it is not entirely mended.
Was Bill Ayers a terrorist back then? Maybe. More to the point, I think he was simply part of a larger terror. As were we all.
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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/
Big Shot
March 8, 2009
“You need to find a place with some fat,” said the nurse practioner.
I looked to see if she was kidding. I am 100 pounds heavier than I should be. Fat? Fat I got.
“I think I can find some,” I said.
Under her watchful eye, I opened up the insulin pen, swabbed the business end with alcohol, twisted the needle assembly onto it, and then pulled off the needle cover.
It’s really tiny, about the thickness of a leader on a fishing line, and half an inch long.
“How do they make them that small,” I asked. She didn’t know.
I set the dial on the pen at 10 units. Over the next week or so, I’ll adjust that dose upward as my blood sugar levels come down. When the blood sugar hovers around 100 or a little better, I will be at the right dose.
My scores using only pills to control my diabetes haven’t been all that hot. They’ve been ranging wildly between 140, which is not all that bad, to 440 when I was first diagnosed about 15 years ago. At 440, I was wandering around in a fog, with tunnel vision. I told the nurse at the time that I felt kind of far away.
“That’s because you’re damned near dead,” which made me feel ever so much better.
You have to understand that I really just wanted it to go away. I mean, diabetes is a serious commitment. Who wants that? I really wanted to believe it was a phase or something like a really nagging cold, something that would clear up and I’d be right as rain in no time.
Time dragged on, and so did I. Weird numb spots on my feet. Changes in my vision. Less energy. Face it: I’m a guy. You really have to slap me upside the head to get my attention. I’ve looked around in my closet, and there is no cape, no form-fitting superhero costume. This stuff was killing me.
So, Thursday I pointed the needle ceilingward and thunked the side of the pen with my finger and pushed the plunger to make sure the needle wasn’t clogged and there was no air trapped within.
Tiny drops of clear liquid beaded up and ran down the needle.
Insulin.
I suddenly realized how close the balance is; that what will be less than a thimble full of this stuff shoved under my skin every day will make so much difference. I mean, I’m still going to die. So are you (sorry.) But this, barring the unforseen, will help me move a little further back in the line. I didn’t want to be giving myself injections. Who would? But, all things considered, I am in no way ready to leave this particular circus, not just yet, anyway, and certainly not by inches.
It didn’t have to be this way, of course. It’s my own damned fault. It is Type II diabetes, which means it is most likely attributable to my weight and diet, and not enough exercise. I picked up a lot of weight when I quit my three-pack-a-day habit about 20 years ago, and never worked hard enough to shed it.
After 15 years of taking a number of pills twice a day, the control just isn’t there. So, the choices are to face things like blindness, lost of a limb or two, or death, or start giving myself shots.
Gee, doc…can I have some time to think this over?
So, there I was, pinching a handful of potbelly in the presence of Sue, my partner now for many years, and Kathy Miller, the nurse-practioner, looking on…
With a snap of my wrist, the needle drove home. I think I heard a pop as it broke through the skin, but I’m not sure. It didn’t hurt, at least not enough to make me jump or break into some colorful language. Nothing at all like a bee sting or a thorn. Not even enough to make me blink. I pushed the plunger and held it down for 10 seconds, as instructed. Then I pulled it out. A spot of blood the size of a pinhead. That’s it.
The next night, my blood sugar hadn’t changed much. Uh-oh. I started to imagine the worst. It doesn’t work. I fall into a slow spiral of decay and disability, leading to, well, bad stuff.
The night after that, my sugar was 124. That’s a place it hadn’t been in 15 years.
I stare at the test gizmo until it shuts itself off out of boredom.
That means that, in two weeks when I go back for a progress report to Kathy Miller, I have to tell her, yes, you were right, I needed to give myself shots of insulin, I was an idiot not to start sooner, when you first started to nag me about it.
I’m really gonna hate that.
Hopefully, for a long time to come.
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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
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